Oil and Health Care in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan

Health care systems reflect historical relationships between states and citizens, as well as predominant values and institutions marking a particular social milieu. Theories that place national health care in historical social context tend to exaggerate the forces of globalization and to underestimate the role of local specificities. A health care system and its social context, however, are shaped at the intersection of global, regional, and local factors, rather than by globalization alone. In this article I demonstrate this combined influence by tracking the transition in Soviet to post-Soviet health care Azerbaijan. I show that the dissolution of Azerbaijan’s socialized health care was due not to neoliberal globalization, but rather to the historical constellation of global, regional, and national processes, including the political choice of a petroleum-based development strategy.